


The Come-back Cat

by suitesamba



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Realism, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 21:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6210298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/suitesamba/pseuds/suitesamba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Come-back cats, reincarnated spirits, sometimes appear after a loved one's death. But when Blue the cat shows up at 221B nearly a year after Sherlock's suicide, no one quite knows what to make of it. The cat could easily be Sherlock, but everyone knows that suicide victims don't get to come back. Or do they?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Come-back Cat

**Author's Note:**

> I had a kernel of an idea - Sherlock as a cat - and this was the rather late-night result. The story is a bit whimsical, and a bit of a fairy tale, and assumes a bit more about John and Sherlock's relationship than is explicitly portrayed in the series through Season 2.

He had the most remarkable eyes – golden with flecks of blue and grey – and prowled about the alley, hiding behind the bins and nosing into discarded belongings. He looked like a Russian Blue, a fairly rare breed for come-back cats, and was a bit too wary of John, and a bit too taken up with Mrs. Hudson. When he finally ventured inside, h wasn’t lured in by a can of tuna, but by the classical music John was playing for him. The cat came and went at all hours, could almost never be coaxed to eat yet had an unusual fascination with the refrigerator, would disappear, sometimes overnight and well into the next day, and was ruining John’s jumpers at an alarming rate.

“It’s him. Don’t even tell me it isn’t,” John announced one morning, holding up yet another rank, soiled jumper as he passed Mrs. Hudson on the way to the alley bin. 

“Oh John, it can’t be him,” Mrs. Hudson said, touching him on the shoulder as he came back inside. “You know it doesn’t work that way. Come-backs have to _want_ to live a bit longer.” 

“He’s pissing on my jumpers. He likes classical music. He barely eats.” He looked up the stairs and sighed and knew that Mrs. Hudson, too, could still see his shadow there. “It’s him.”

“But it’s been nearly a year.” She lowered her voice. “If it is him, where’s he been all these months, John? Don’t you think he would have found his way home a long time ago?” She gave him a wan smile, a trifle pitying, he thought. “It only took my gran a few days to find us again, and she was such a fat come-back that she could hardly make it up the stairs.”

“Maybe he’s been with Mycroft,” John said, sitting on the stairs with a sigh. “They favour families, don’t they?”

The cat, who was sitting at the top of the stairs in front of the open door, yowled.

“No. Not with Mycroft then,” said Mrs. Hudson with a fond smile. She touched John’s shoulder again. “And don’t sell yourself short, John. You’re all the family Sherlock ever wanted.”

John looked away, smiling sadly.

“He could be a stray, you know. Just an ordinary cat who saw that you were lonely and took a shine to your jumpers.”

“He could be,” John acknowledged with another glance toward the upstairs flat. “But he’s not.”

ooOOOoo

Lestrade allowed for the possibility that Blue could be Sherlock’s come-back.

“I know how it’s supposed to work – how it usually works, anyway,” he said as he sat on the sofa, dangling a beer bottle by the neck and staring at the cat, which was stretched out on the back of Sherlock’s chair in a position that could not possibly be comfortable, soaking in the fading sun. He lowered his voice, much as Mrs. Hudson had when speaking of this particular, uncomfortable subject. “You don’t _get_ to come back if you take your own life. But John - _look_ at him.”

The cat opened one eye, regarded them with disinterest, then closed the eye again.

“I look at him every day,” John said. “Or at least the days he bothers to come home. He made such a mess of my stacks of mail on the table the other day I could have sworn….” He trailed off and took a long swallow of beer, then stared over Greg’s shoulder at the fireplace. “And someone keeps knocking the skull off the mantel.”

Greg chuckled.

“He’s a beauty, John. Sleek and clean. He looks almost regal.”

“He should look clean – he spends a good part of the day grooming,” muttered John. 

“Any reason you seem to resent it so much?” Greg asked, hefting his beer bottle for another swig as he continued to watch the dozing cat.

“I don’t know,” John answered. He joined Greg in watching the cat and ignoring the telly. “I don’t like cats, I suppose.”

“Never had one, then? A come-back?”

John shook his head, well aware that admitting that told Greg quite a bit about himself, and his family, that he didn’t usually share with others. He didn’t need to elaborate that his parents hadn’t been happy enough on earth to want to stay a bit longer, hadn’t been the kind of people a cat would want to settle with for a well-deserved dozen or so years of wind-down time before the great beyond.

Greg was silent for a few minutes, and when he spoke again, his voice was low, and fond, filled with a sad sort of nostalgia.

“I had a sister – she died when I was three. I hardly remember her – she was only nine herself. Leukemia.”

“Oh – I’m sorry. I didn’t know. That’s – sad.” John shifted uncomfortably.

“Yeah.” Greg sighed, a remembered sadness. “I only ever knew her come-back, really. Cassie. I remember my mum curled up on the sofa with Cassie in her lap. They’re – comforting. You know, I think it’s really all about us, don’t you think? The ones left behind?”

John gave a nod of disinterested agreement and continued to stare at the basking cat.

“Yeah. Except – well, this one….” He trailed off. “I’m for another one – you?”

Greg nodded. “Sure.”

John returned with two fresh bottles, and they resumed ignoring the telly in favour of staring at the cat, who continued to ignore them quite successfully.

“This one doesn’t – well, it doesn’t engage me. Aren’t they supposed to do that? Tune in to your feelings? 

“You expect Sherlock’s come-back to recognize your emotions?” Greg said with a laugh. “Yeah – they’re here for a reason, John. But do you really think he’d follow the rules?”

John responded with a wry smile. 

“No. Of course not.” He tilted his head a fraction and regarded the sleeping cat. When he spoke, it was in a hushed voice, nearly a whisper, as if he didn’t want to wake the cat, or didn’t want it to overhear him. “Yeah. It’s got to be him. Who else would deliberately piss on my jumpers?”

ooOOOoo

Molly dropped by unexpectedly one Sunday afternoon. The cat followed John to the door and, instead of slipping out and demanding to be let out to the alley, it rubbed its cheek against Molly’s leg and stared up at her as she bent to scratch its head.

“I heard about you,” she said. She was obviously a cat person. She spoke to the cat, not about it, and knew exactly where its sweet spots might be. “But you’re not Sherlock, are you? You’re just a happy coincidence.”

The cat, which vocalized so rarely, yowled, as if bothered by her choice of word.

“See?” She scratched under its chin, then stood and smiled at John. “He agrees.”

“He pisses on my jumpers,” John informed her. “He keeps ridiculous hours. He’s fastidious about grooming, and he’s an extremely picky eater. And yesterday he gagged up a hairball on top of my football magazines.”

“You don’t know cats very well, do you?” she asked. She’d wandered, rather tentatively, John noticed, into the flat, and was standing near the window, biting her bottom lip and not looking at Sherlock’s chair.

“No – actually, I don’t. Never had one before.” He watched as Blue sniffed at a bit of mud clinging to the heel of her shoe. “Get comfortable – I’ll make tea.”

“You’ve never had one,” Molly repeated. She sat on the edge of the sofa and the cat jumped up beside her. She scratched its ears. “None at all?”

“Nope.” He registered her surprise. “Do you have one?”

“My mum’s with me now,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I call her Dinah.”

“Ah.” He turned on the kettle and sat on the arm of his chair while it heated. “So – you really think mine’s just ordinary, then?”

Blue had jumped to the floor again, and was playing with the mud chunk that had fallen off her shoe.

Molly watched the cat at play, smiling fondly. “He can’t be Sherlock, John. He’d have come ages ago, right? And – he wouldn’t, would he? Not the way he went. He wanted it to be final.”

He didn’t understand why Molly wouldn’t let him have this one. What was so bad about letting a man in mourning think he had a little piece of his old life back, a fraction of his shattered heart?

“You’re lucky to have an ordinary cat,” Molly told him after they’d finished their tea and endured semi-awkward silences while Molly petted and cooed over Blue and bit her bottom lip and tried not to cry. “You don’t have to be so attached to him – I’d be a mess if Dinah went missing, or wanted to go out in the alley. You two can just coexist here, and you’ll have a bit of company at least.”

“He’s really not much company,” John said. 

But in all honestly, he liked having Blue around. The ruined jumpers were more or less relics, anyway, left-overs from a bygone day. There was no one around to notice them anymore, or to hide them, or refuse to leave the flat with John while he was wearing one. The jumpers were boring when no one noticed how horrid they were, or dared to say so, anyway, at least not in his presence.

And so Blue, who probably wasn’t Sherlock come-back, but who _could_ be, _might_ be, continued on as he’d begun. Blue with the magical eyes, and self-centered attitude, and propensity for destruction of his environment. Blue who enjoyed classical music and slept in unconventional places at unconventional hours and nosed around the personal effects of visitors and smelled their shoes and tasted the mud from their boots.

And John, who’d been desperately, abjectly lonely before Blue turned up, bought some decent shirts in colours other than Christmas green and oatmeal to replace the ruined jumpers. He opened the door to his old bedroom upstairs and rigged a cat door that gave Blue direct access to the roof. He went to visit Molly to have a look at Dinah, and didn’t see a thing in her that he didn’t see in Blue. 

And he began to talk to Blue.

Blue was a good listener, one who didn’t interrupt and rarely got up and wandered off while John was talking. 

John, never quite sure if Blue was a come-back cat or just an ordinary stray, eventually decided it didn’t matter. Sherlock was gone, and even a Sherlock-imbued cat didn’t bring him back. Not even one that dismembered mice in the kitchen and once left three heads in a tiny pile in front of the fridge, as if hinting to John to open the door so he could store them properly. Not even a cat who scratched a hole in the side of the sofa then crawled inside and fetched one of Sherlock’s forgotten socks, crumpled and forlorn, and carried it about the flat like a prize until John took it away. He couldn’t, in the end, bin it, so he washed it with his laundry and filled it with stuffing and catnip, then tossed it back to Blue. Couldn’t be as bad as nicotine and cocaine, he decided.

Blue, glassy-eyed, thought it was just fine.

ooOOOoo

Blue had been with John nearly a year when he woke to a cat fight in the alley.

Probably nothing, he told himself. Probably not Blue at all.

But it was Blue, as evidenced by the bloody mess that greeted him in the morning when he stumbled into the kitchen to plug in the kettle.

He patched him up as best he could – stitches to close up the piece of ear that was gone, salve on the lacerations, a tight splint on the broken leg after carefully working the bones back in place, apologizing to the cat the entire time, speaking in a low, soothing voice. He gave the eye up for lost, and mourned the beautiful orb that would never shine again, but treated it for infection nonetheless. He offered water, which the cat accepted, and food, which he did not, then spread a pile of shirts from his laundry basket on his bed and carefully nestled the animal in them, and called down to Mrs. Hudson.

Work was interminable that day. He could think only of Blue, and how he was faring, and how he should never have let the beast wander. 

Blue was well enough to be moved to a bed on the floor that night, where he mewled pitifully until John realised he needed the litter pan, then somehow, splinted leg and all, crawled up into John’s bed and claimed his good pillow while John settled for the lumpy one.

When he woke to the early morning light, Blue was gone from his pillow and there was a great deal of noise coming from the stairway.

“John – open the door! Hurry!”

He didn’t make it in time – Mycroft Holmes, supporting one half of a bruised and battered … someone … had already keyed in by the time he stumbled into the sitting room in his vest and pants. Molly Hooper had the other side and was panting, valiantly trying to hold up her end of things.

“Leg may be broken – superficial wounds to the face, severe lacerations to the back and hips. John – your medkit. Hurry!”

John could have stood there for an hour gawking at Mycroft Holmes in a rumpled, bloody suit, panting from the effort of hauling the injured man up the stairs. Or the incongruous pairing of Mycroft and Molly. Or this anything but mild and demure Molly who barked orders. Or the fact that he knew – without even looking at the man on the floor – that this was Sherlock, bruised and battered, torn and bleeding, but alive.

He should have been shocked beyond words, angry beyond belief at the deception. But he’d spent a year befriending a come-back cat who might or might not be Sherlock, a year believing that a common house cat was the man who he’d watched plummet from the roof of St. Bart’s.

He ran for his medkit.

Blue was the furthest thing from his mind for the next few hours.

He worked methodically.

He was back in Afghanistan and this was just another wounded soldier. Molly worked silently beside him, anticipating his needs, better than any medic or field nurse he’d ever had. 

He sutured the ear. Just any ear – he was careful to stay detached. Treated the deep lacerations on the upper back and shoulders. Cleaned debris – dirt and ash and dust and sand – from the eye. 

“He needs the hospital.” He’d said it three times that first hour, four times more the second. 

Mycroft, on his mobile over near the window, called out tersely. “Working on it.”

“It’s good, John. His breathing hasn’t changed. Heart rate is steady.”

He tied off a suture. “You knew. That’s why you were so sure Blue wasn’t a come-back.”

She didn’t answer immediately. Her eyes were on Sherlock’s chair, where a steel-grey cat with a splinted leg and bandaged ear watched them through its one good eye.

“Not a come-back, no. But not an ordinary cat either.” She looked back at John, who was studying Sherlock’s face with something like wonder in his eyes. “A placeholder, I think.”

“I’m going to kill you both, you know.” He pressed his lips together as the enormity began to settle in, then touched Sherlock’s battered face. “Maybe all three of you.”

A soft smile lit her thin face.

“No you’re not,” she murmured. 

“No, I’m not,” he agreed, releasing a breath he’d been holding for two long years. “No, I’m not.”

ooOOOoo

“The flat isn’t large enough for two men and a cat,” Sherlock complained, his voice still rough from months of disuse and the pneumonia that had set in during his long convalescence. But there was no conviction in it, and Blue the cat continued to doze in Sherlock’s lap. 

John scratched the cat’s ears as he handed Sherlock a steaming mug of tea and settled across from him in his own chair with his newspaper. “The flat’s plenty big, and I’m one of the lucky ones. It looks like I get to keep you both.” 

“We aren’t commodities, John,” Sherlock protested, again without conviction. In the short time he’d been home at 221B, he seemed happy enough to have a warm cup of tea and a pillow beneath his head. 

“Don’t make me choose,” John said with a smile. “He’s a hell of a lot less trouble than you are.” He held up his hands. “No thumbs – can’t open the refrigerator on his own.” 

Sherlock looked down at his lap and drew his hand over the cat’s soft fur from nape of neck to tail. 

“I’m sorry, you know,” he said after a time. “I hope he wasn’t too much trouble. I didn’t send him here – no matter what Molly claims.” 

“Are you saying he’s a happy coincidence, then?” John asked. 

Sherlock raised his eyes, then dropped them again. His hand trembled, just slightly, as he continued to stroke the cat, and John was mindful of how ill he’d been, how close they’d come to losing him again. 

“Sometimes, I was sure I could see you, in 221B. I’d see you sitting right there, reading, watching television. I hated how alone you were. I hated not being here.” 

John watched the shaking hand stroke the cat, watched the cat, the cat who barely tolerated his touch, relax into the caress. Moved beyond measure, heart full of the impossible made real, he risked the kind of smile that could never be taken back once bestowed on its recipient. 

“You were here,” he said, thinking of the cat, and the jumpers, and the mouse heads, and the way Blue flew down the stairs. “You were always here.” 

And if his hand settled on his chest, over his heart, it was, most decidedly, not a coincidence at all. 

__Fin_ _


End file.
